Former UFC lightweight champion Charles Oliveira made history on Friday when he was the first UFC champion to miss weight on the scales and thus be stripped of his title. But the weight miss wasn’t cut and dry and shortly after weighing in several UFC fighters stepped up to share that they’d gotten calls before weighing informing them of a scale issue and adjusting accordingly.
Now, a UFC executive is debunking that theory.
“Well, first of all, let me say that the official scale, which is the one they weighed in on Friday with the athletic commission … 28 of the fighters made weight,” UFC vice president of regulatory affairs Marc Ratner said Tuesday on Sirius XM’s “Unlocking the Cage” (h/t MMA Junkie). “So I’m very, very sure that there was nothing untoward on that scale. That scale was accurate.”
Ratner also explained what the fighters meant about the scale issues.
“What people are talking about, the night before, there’s a scale where the fighters can come down and check their weight,” he said. “Some fighters wanted to change the scale from pounds to kilograms, which you can do, and I think that may have knocked it – we don’t have any proof of anything, but it may have knocked the (practice) scale out of calibration. When we found out that there was a problem with the scale early on Friday morning somewhere around 8 or 8:30, we got another scale that was calibrated and put it out there.”
White said at the post-fight presser that the scale will now need to be guarded 24/7 by security.
The mishap could explain why on Friday night Oliveira and his team tweeted that the champion had already made weight.
“I am not sure what time that Charles or his camp came down on Friday,” Ratner said. “But he’s saying that he checked the weight on Thursday night, and he was fine. But I can say for sure that Friday there was nothing wrong with the official scale.”
Many fans have criticized the use of the old fashioned scale as opposed to the digital scale, which Ratner also addressed.
“Digital scale, sometimes you get tenths of ounces. Or not even tenths – a pound is 16 ounces,” Ratner said. “You’d hate to have just a regular fight, and the weight is supposed to be 155 and you can weigh up to 156, and on the digital scale you could weigh 156.2. Well, that doesn’t make sense either. We’ve always used the meat scale. It’s accurate, it’s balanced, it’s calibrated, so I have no problem using it.”